THE TRYING TYRONE SERIES : EPISODE 3 – Let Me Explain

"This is all so confusing … can you break it down for me? You know what? Start from the beginning"

I was tired. It felt like I'd been talking all day and it had only been a few hours.

"Alright."

"It started September 2013. No. June 2013. It was the day after my high school graduation. My parents, my brother and myself were headed to Nigeria for "vacation".

We were supposed to be back in August in time for me to resume at NYU for my freshman year in college but unknown to me, my parents had a different plan.

June became July and July became August and the vacation still hadn't ended. Jamal, that's my brother, and I started pestering my parents about when we would return so we could prepare for school and that's when they came clean.

Dad had been "laid off" and it would be best for us to "lay low" in Nigeria for a while. Back then, their usage of those terms didn't seem so odd but now, of course, everything makes sense.

So in September, I resumed in Wren University. I wasn't eligible for any of their science courses so I had to study an arts course. My mum tried to get me into their Mass Communication program but that didn't work out somehow so I had to settle for Performing Arts.

Anyone who knows me, then, and even now, knows how big of a joke that is. So I was in school and hated everything and everyone.

Students and lecturers picked on my accent and people tried to jump me on several occasions. In fact, it was on one of those occasions that I met Brenda.

I had run into her a couple of times in school but I only knew her from afar like everyone else. She was a pretty popular girl on the school campus for a couple of reasons. Firstly, she seemed quite playful and then of course, there was her boyfriend.

Brenda was the main chick of Dunge. There were rumors that he was something of a drug lord. If it wasn't that, then it was that he was a Yahoo Yahoo boy. I had no reasons to believe the rumors or otherwise. Like I said, I only knew her from afar, until one fateful day like that.